Text Link Ads

I’ve been playing with Text Link Ads (aff) lately as a way to supplement AdSense revenue, so I thought I’d write about – and why I like it so much.If you don’t already know, TLA allows you to sell links on your site to advertisers on a monthly basis. The TLA site is effectively a marketplace for advertisers where they can search for relevant sites and buy links. Pricing is based on the popularity and subject of your site, and TLA takes 50%. Simple.But TLA is different from other link ad services because the links are ‘hard coded’ into the HTML of your site, rather than served by Javascript. This means advertisers also get a lasting link value from advertising on your site. If you have a good PageRank and a niche topic, you’ll probably get advertisers fighting for a spot on your site because not only do the get relevant visitors, but they also get get a search engine benefit from being linked to by a well ranked site.From what I’ve read, advertisers often renew their ads from month to month too – so while it may take a while to fill all your ad slots (and you can choose how many you want to sell), once you’ve got a few good advertisers you should find your site making money consistently.The down side to this is that you can’t use TLA if you’re only able to use static HTML on your site (i.e. no PHP/ASP/etc). But just about every decent web host allows some kind of server side coding these days, and TLA provides the code for just about every language as well as plugins for WordPress and other blogging engines.But the best thing about TLA is that it’s non-contextual, which means you can serve AdSense ads on the same page. You won’t have to remove other ads from your site if you just want to try it out for a few months. In fact, as the links just appear as a normal part of your site, people won’t even know they’re ads unless you choose to tell them. I like that level of control.My only real gripe with the system is that the help pages are currently a little limited, but to be honest, it’s so simple I’ve not really had to use it. If you’ve got a web site and think you deserve more revenue than you’re actually getting, I’d definitely recommend giving it a go. You’ve got nothing to lose.